A violent poem by a high schooler results in his criminal conviction. Gosh, I’m glad the police never looked at the stuff I wrote in high school. California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, asked if the First Amendment would protect a bank robber who handed the teller a note reading, “Roses are red, violets are blue, give me the money or I’ll shoot you.”

Natasha Walker talks about portrayals of pornography in serious modern literature. (darn, lost that link!)

Although it was Martin Amis who said that pornography is littered with the death of feelings, it is women writers who have dramatised this most explicitly. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize this week, is a fascinating exploration of a world in which pornography has taken over from sexual intimacy. She writes of a dystopian future in which the needs of the body rule, and in which the mind and the soul are entirely discredited, a culture in which “Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance”.

According to geologist Ross Stein, there are five non-US megacities built over major faultlines. These cities have next to no building regulations, so any earthquake to hit these areas would them devastate them on a scale the world has never seen).